Africa needs an intervention

Robert Mugabe is still in power in Zimbabwe, and the government of Sudan is still killing its… Robert Mugabe is still in power in Zimbabwe, and the government of Sudan is still killing its citizens at will, but the people of both nations can now rest easy because the African Union is on the case.

Adhering to both its dogmatic anti-Western philosophy and desire to solve as few of the problems plaguing Africa as possible, the AU has recently opposed action by the International Criminal Court to bring Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the genocidal dictator of Sudan, to justice and rejected any efforts by Western nations to impose sanctions on Mugabe’s government.

But what else can you expect from an organization that counts among its member states a number of dictatorships and their close allies?

Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, was supposed to use his nation’s economic clout to bring a peaceful end to the Mugabe dictatorship. Instead, Mbeki has displayed a sickening deference to Mugabe and his thuggish rule.

Mbeki has clouded the international discussion with the anti-Western and anti-colonial rhetoric of black South Africa’s ruling political party, the African National Congress. Both the ANC and Mugabe came to power through anti-colonial struggle, and both are now using the history of European colonialism to shame the West into inaction.

But Mbeki shouldn’t be able to shame anyone into anything. He is, after all, the man who denied the link between HIV and AIDS for years while millions of Africans died of the disease.

The real problem is that Western nations informed by post-colonial guilt and liberal idealism have decided to let organizations such as the AU solve their own problems without Western interference. But the AU has failed miserably in this regard, and Africans are forced to suffer the consequences of their leaders’ incompetence.

But last week it looked as though the Western nations of the U.N. Security Council would finally act to protect the people of Zimbabwe even if Mbeki and other African leaders would not. The United States and the United Kingdom sponsored sanctions against Mugabe’s government that included travel restrictions and an arms embargo. However, China and Russia both exercised their veto powers to prevent the sanctions from being enacted.

The only thing that this recent development in the Security Council proves is that neither an entirely international nor regional solution is possible in Zimbabwe. Instead, it is time for Britain, as the former colonial power in possession of Zimbabwe, to step in and restore order.

Regrettably, the problems faced in addressing the crisis in Sudan are fairly similar to the problems in addressing Zimbabwe, as once again the AU has proven incapable of solving regional issues.

The AU has maintained a roughly 7,000-person peacekeeping mission in western Sudan since 2005 that has accomplished little, and now the AU has made it clear that it opposes the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Bashir for crimes of genocide. The AU’s Peace and Security Council even released a statement expressing “the AU’s concern with the misuse of indictments against African leaders.”

I can’t even imagine what the international response would be like if a European country had expressed “concern” over the indictment of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. The fact is that the president of Sudan is a criminal, and the AU has decided to try to protect him just like they are protecting Mugabe.

Authoritarian regimes in Russia and China have to be tolerated by the international community because such countries are too powerful to be challenged in the international court system or through military intervention. In the case of Africa, there is no such reason to tolerate dictatorships and genocide, problems that could be solved if Western nations overcame their shame over past legacies of colonialism and once again took an active role in African politics.

Both Zimbabwe and Sudan were better off under British rule, and while I know that such a thing is politically incorrect, it is true.

In Zimbabwe, life expectancy has decreased dramatically to the lowest of any country in the world, hyperinflation has destroyed the economy, and almost everyone who can afford to emigrate has done so. Sudan is currently experiencing a genocide that has claimed the lives of 300,000 people, according to the United Nations, and displaced millions more.

The post-colonial rhetoric of African leaders such as Mbeki and Mugabe has proven to be dangerous and detrimental to the standard of living in Africa. The AU and its “concerns” must be disregarded by Western nations that should now take matters into their own hands.

But none of this is possible if the citizens of Western nations do not change their attitudes toward their nations’ pasts. Colonialism was and is morally objectionable in many cases, but former colonial powers such as Britain proved that they could handle the problems of nations such as Zimbabwe and Sudan.

If an end to genocide in Sudan or the raising of the standard of living in Zimbabwe requires that both those nations lose their sovereignty, then so be it.

E-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.